Paul Singer Quotes

[In February 2004 on whether the court cases he gets involved in might not also be a little fun.] Fun? Skiing is fun. This is work.
Paul Singer

[In September 2006 on CDOs.] It is still surprising how many investment fads have elaborate spindrifts of ethereal logic which, when stripped away, are really dumb.
Paul Singer

[In January 2008.] We never had a dispute with a sovereign which could not pay its debts. Our disputes have always been with sovereigns who can pay but refuse to do so.
Paul Singer

My job is to make sure we are protected from the predictable and the unpredictable.
Paul Singer

One powerful measure of attractiveness of a trade is when there is the potential to make outsized gains for very little risk.
Paul Singer

What we found was an extraordinary level of mispricing of risk. The ratings of the securities were extremely erroneous.
Paul Singer

[In January 2008 on betting against subprime mortgages.] Never seen anything like it in 30 years. Financial institutions did not check, and the rating agencies let them down.
Paul Singer

[In January 2008.] Our primary goal is to find bankruptcy situations where our ability to control or influence the process is the driver of value. That's our favorite.
Paul Singer

I looked at it, and I said, I don't think they can do that.
Paul Singer

[In January 2008 on not letting debtor nationals such as Congo off the hook.] These are countries where the leaders are comfortable and there is poverty. If somebody sits down and talks to you, then you make a deal. If not, you get a judgment.
Paul Singer

[In January 2008 on taking further advantage of the collapse of subprime mortgages and CDO’s.] It’s the opportunity of a lifetime.
Paul Singer

[In April 2009.] Free-marketers should welcome some regulation. The private sector made the biggest mistakes.
Paul Singer

[In April 2009.] It's true that monetary policy was too lax for too long, and the government encouraged lending to people who were unlikely to repay their loans. But this crisis was primarily caused by managements and individuals throughout the financial system who exercised extremely poor judgment. The private sector, not the public sector, is where the biggest mistakes were made.
Paul Singer

[In March 2011.] Of course printing money is going to support asset prices… but it's very dangerous.
Paul Singer

[In March 2011.] We institutionally have tried to - way before the crisis of '08 - tried to insulate ourselves in every way we can from the counterparty problem.
Paul Singer

[In March 2011.] We've removed as many assets from the Street as we possibly can, and we think we're pretty well insulated… If we could completely avoid being subject to the financial condition of any large financial institution, we would do so.
Paul Singer

[In August 2012.] It is impossible to understand the financial health of big financial institutions and their potential impact on the market. They don't even understand it themselves.
Paul Singer

[In September 2012.] Investing is an art, more so than a science. And for me, what I get paid for is managing the ‘dark art,’ if you will, of risk management and trying to be a visionary and having a dark vision at all times about what can go wrong.
Paul Singer

[In September 2012.] The lesson of ’08, which is indelibly stamped upon every hedge fund forehead and trading desk head, is: Move your assets first, stop trading first, sell the paper first, and ask questions later. Those that moved from Lehman days or weeks before the end were happy. Those that sat there thinking that they were protected in prime brokerage accounts or protected in some other ways, or that firms like Lehman wouldn’t be allowed to go under were stuck in the company (of course Lehman is still in bankruptcy) with claims trading at 20-something cents on the dollar, depending on where you are in the capital structure.
Paul Singer

[In September 2012.] One of the things that 2008 showed us about risk management was that some of the tools that we thought that we had for risk management were actually tools that could be harmed or defeated by the actions of governments.
Paul Singer

[In October 2012.] The thing that scares me most is significant inflation…
Paul Singer

[In 2013.] My dad convinced me that investing was a good thing to do.
Paul Singer

[In 2013.] When I was in law school, in the years ’66 through ’69, he and I traded stocks long and short, with very, very tiny amounts of money. A lot of people back then enjoyed participating in the capitalist system, even if they only had $1,000 or $2,000 to be trading. And basically I think I found every possible way to lose money in the stock market.
Paul Singer

[In 2013 looking back at very his early days.] My introduction to risk and risk management - the difficulty of deciding when any asset is so cheap that it can’t get cheaper or so expensive that it can’t get more expensive - my introduction to those lessons was personal and visceral, not academic.
Paul Singer

[On him and his father investing together as a university law student.] We did terribly. Our trading results were adversely affected by a combination of whipsaw markets, what in retrospect was superficial research and then sort of the coup de grâce, the 1974 bear market. By that time I was managing a tiny little family partner-ship and lost almost all the money in it.
Paul Singer

[In 2013 on getting started.] You know, sometimes when you’re on a diving board, somebody comes back and gives you a little boot in the rear end. And the boot in the rear end in 1976 was that the two guys running DLJ real estate, as I recall, were fired, and the thing basically was in disbanding mode. I said to my wife at the time: ‘Gee, I really enjoy this other stuff, and actually I can make fees roughly comparable to my job as a staff lawyer. I’d like to do this.’ And she said: ‘Sure. Why not?’ We didn’t have an extravagant lifestyle at all. We lived in a rental apartment.
Paul Singer

[In 2013 on taking a chance by leaving his job as a lawyer to go and manage money.] I don’t want to exaggerate the taking a chance part. It was something I was really interested in doing.
Paul Singer

[In 2013.] I had never worked as an investment professional on Wall Street, so I didn’t have any grandiose notion of myself as a master trader. But this convertible hedging was very solid.
Paul Singer

[In 2013.] My style in convertible arbitrage was low leverage and being very reliably hedged, meaning I rarely shaded the hedge ratios, rarely went just long or short convertibles.
Paul Singer

[In 2013.] One of the lessons of my pre-Elliott life is that it’s difficult — and, I later came to conclude, impossible — to determine turning points. So I felt — and it was part of my strategy then, and it’s part of my strategy now — that being risk managed at all times and hedged at all times is the only way to actually control risk.
Paul Singer

[In 2013.] We had been making money, good money, in the 1980s in convertibles. So when the 1987 crash happened - the timing of which was a surprise to me, as it always has been in crises — the portfolio volatility really was dampened by the combination of the convertibles and the hedges. We still lost 3.5 percent in the crash quarter, but we made money for the year as a whole.
Paul Singer

[On the 1987 stock market crash and convertibles.] The crash experience was pretty searing because despite being hedged and not losing too much money, I saw the way convertibles traded: They became extremely illiquid during the crash and for a few weeks afterward.
Paul Singer

[After the 1987 stock market crash and convertibles.] What happened after the crash, in a gradual process, was boosting the proportion of capital devoted to some other strategies that I had undertaken during the 1980s. Distressed became the largest area of capital deployment, but I also built fixed-income arbitrage and event arbitrage.
Paul Singer

Our first distressed trade was Western Union in the mid-1980s. What we came to like very much about distressed investing is the opportunity to control one’s destiny and to make money in a different way than just buying a security that had its value priced by other market participants.
Paul Singer

[On distressed investing in 2013.] We are willing to trade, wherever possible, complexity and manual effort for risk and to sign on for opacity when we think that we can join a process, control a process, make something happen through our manual efforts and our analysis of complexity rather than just identifying an undervalued stock or an undervalued security that’s related to the value of businesses.
Paul Singer

[In 2013.] I’m very interested in trying to understand what’s actually happening in the American and the global economy and financial markets and the financial system. Yet I do not make large, directional, do-or-die bets based on these predictions.
Paul Singer

[In 2013.] I’m almost always assuming or forcing myself to assume that the world is managed poorly and that the experts - including the experts that I hire that give me advice - don’t really know what’s going on and I have to take all of their advice with grains and grains of salt.
Paul Singer